1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to methods and systems for identifying connections between users and links between articles. For example, embodiments of the present invention relate generally to methods and systems for using social networks to identify connections between users, such as members in the social networks, and correlating such connections with links between articles.
2. Background
Online advertising and search engines are ubiquitous on the Internet and World Wide Web. Online advertising in such forms as banner ads and pop-up ads include links that implore viewers to click on the ads and be directed to a linked website for further information on the advertised products or services. Advertisers entice websites to host ads by, for example, paying a flat periodic fee or a set fee per each click through (i.e., a click on the ad to be directed to an advertiser's site). Such financial structure for online advertising is susceptible to ad spamming. For example, webmasters of ad-hosting websites can attempt to increase their financial gains from advertisers by collaborating with one another to excessively click on ads hosted on their websites to increase the number of click-throughs or give the appearance that such ads enjoy high traffic.
A search engine, such as the Google™ search engine, returns a result set in response to an input query submitted by a user. Such search engine may use one or more various methods for performing information retrieval. For example, one known method, described in an article entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine,” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, assigns a degree of importance to a document, such as a web page, based on the link structure of the web page. The search engine ranks or sorts the individual articles or documents in the result set based on a variety of measures. For example, the search engine may rank the results based on a popularity score. The search engine generally places the most popular results at the beginning of the result set.
Search methods that rely on link structures also can be susceptible to search spamming. For example, a plurality of webmasters or web administrators can collaborate and link their websites with one another to increase the links to each website, or a single particular website, in order to increase the website's ranking and/or chance of appearance in a search result set returned by the search methods.
Social networking websites such as those hosted on Orkut™, Friendster™, Tribe™, or other websites, allow users to form social networks and become network members. Such networks on the social networking websites allow members of each social network to communicate with each other and list announcements associated with the social network. Generally, these social networks do not communicate with search engines and online advertisers, particularly those that rely on web link structures for searching queries, in order to correlate connections between users and links between websites or web documents and identify ad and search spammings.